Marginalia...

... was the original name of this blog and the subject of the first post on it, so I'm always delighted to find something bloggable that can take the "marginalia" tag.

I love this one, from the biography "John Adams" (pp. 763-764)(commission earned):

Unlike [Thomas] Jefferson, who seldom ever marked a book, and then only faintly in pencil, [John] Adams, pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. It was part of the joy of reading for him, to have something to say himself, to talk back to, agree or take issue with, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, or Joseph Priestley.

Ah, John Adams was a proto-blogger! 

"After college, [Eboni] Thompson started annotating because she missed the feeling of analyzing texts and taking notes."

"One day, she went to the bookstore and bought 'Sense and Sensibility,' by Jane Austen, and as she started reading, she realized how much she wanted to remember about the book after she was finished. 'It wasn’t as intense or as thorough as I do now,' she said of her early annotations. 'It was mostly just little quotes here and there, maybe a word I had never known before, a star next to it, or an idea that I was like, "Oh, I want to come back to that."' Thompson began chronicling her annotations on Instagram and TikTok.... Thompson... recently finished reading and annotating 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame,' a book she said she was glad she read carefully. Annotating slows down her reading process, but the output is worth it.... Annotating feels a bit like homework — an assignment you give yourself that allows you to use special pens and highlighters, colored sticky notes and whatever squiggles and doodles you desire. Maybe it’s not scholarship in the traditional sense, but it’s studious, nonetheless."

From "On Instagram and TikTok, annotating books is an art/A historically academic pursuit is attracting hobbyists who delight in marginalia" by Hope Corrigan (in WaPo).

The first post ever on this blog was about marginalia, and for a day "Marginalia" was the name of the blog. And as for "'Sense and Sensibility,' by Jane Austen," I can't read that phrase without recalling this line from my all-time favorite movie, "My Dinner with André": "I mean there must have been periods when in order to give people a strong or meaningful experience, you wouldn't actually have to take them to Everest.... I mean, there was a time when you could have just, for instance, written — I don't know — 'Sense and Sensibility,' by Jane Austen...."

At the Newark Public Library, you can see a display of almost 4,000 books from Philip Roth's personal library....

"... including a four-volume set about the history of presidential elections, multiple copies of Kafka’s 'The Trial' and a marked-up edition of 'Incredible iPhone Apps for Dummies.'"

 According to "Look Inside Philip Roth’s Personal Library/The author of 'Goodbye, Columbus' and 'The Human Stain' left several thousand books, many of them with notes or letters, to the Newark Public Library." 

I love the high-low juxtaposition of "The Trial" and "Incredible iPhone Apps for Dummies." 

And I love that there's lots of marginalia. (You may remember that marginalia was the subject of the first post on this blog, on January 14, 2004.) 

There are some nice photographs at the link, such as the one of Roth's copy of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" — with Post-It notes and an underline sentence: "'Life,' said Emerson, 'consists in what a man is thinking all day.'"

In that first blog post of mine, I said, among other things, "I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying." Having made a librarian gasp, I'm pleased to see this Newark library constructing a shrine to marginalia.

"… there’s a weird number of people battling snails from medieval times … Why is this?"

"We don’t know. Seriously. There are as many explanations as there are scholars."

One answer is: "Since human knights are often seen trembling before—or, indeed, losing to—the harmless, slow-moving snails, it makes sense that the image is a way to emphasize cowardice."

This blog is 13 years old today.

If you want to read in chronological order, you'll have to start here, January 14, 2004:

This blog is called Marginalia, because I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin, and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book.

If you keep reading, you'll have to read 47,395 posts before you get to this one. Imagine all the transitory matters — big and small — you'd have to get your mind around again to read through these posts — an average of 10 per day for all those days. And — as I've said every year on January 14th — I've written every single day. Never one day without writing. And I'm still going on the intrinsic joy of writing. It's incredibly rewarding to have readers.

It's been great being a law professor for the last 32.5 years. There are many rewards as well as challenges working with colleagues and students, but there is always the element of coercion. You must do your job — obligations continually arise — and the people you interact with are stuck with you. They may like some of it, but they won't like all of it. And there's always a mystery about where the line is between love and tolerance and between tolerance and loathing.

I've withdrawn into the purely voluntary world of blogging. January 12th, the last day of Fall semester and my birthday, was my last day at work. We will see what happens to the blog now with my new dosage of time and freedom. I'm curious to see! I not only have more time and freedom, I have the curiosity to see how the new time and freedom will affect the writing here.

If you don't give a damn, fine! I am weary of inflicting myself on people who may not continually consent to listening to me. I don't like imposing on anyone, and it's not my favorite thing to consume words for which I do not feel an ongoing hunger. How much Supreme Court prose must I drag my eyes across without even the hope of getting to a Scalia opinion? 32.5 years of obligation to slog — 32.5 years of slogligation — is enough.

We're about to get our low-attention-span President, and I will indulge my low-attention-span reading propensities. We will see what happens. So far what has happened, doing only what I love here, is 13 years of 10-post-a-day blogging without a single day's break. It's not as though I'm doggedly plugging away here trying to keep a record going. It's only blogging if it runs on intrinsic reward.

The heart is still beating, and it's one more morning on Althouse. Or as it was for just that first day, Marginalia.

"Mere reading... is not enough; rather, we must mark our texts lest we forget the wisdom so recently acquired."

"Inscription is a critical part of 'use.' Far from being passive, readers, in their act of marking — a conscious deciding to remember — become participants in a historical body of understanding.... [T]hese marks constitute a kind of graffiti, albeit one stripped of its transgressive connotations... [Books] were items to be improved, even perfected, by the marginal additions of their owners. This historical understanding of books as locations, as readerly edifices within which one might store practical information, binding legal documentation, jokes, and ownership lists, alongside more traditional textual engagement, challenges our contemporary perception of a book’s materiality, one which often equates pristine margins with the value of the new. 'At what point did marginalia […] become a way of defacing [the book] rather than of increasing its value?'..."

From an essay on marginalia by Dustin Illingworth.

Marginalia is the oldest topic on this blog, the subject of the first post, and actually the original name of this blog.

"I stupidly made this blot on the first of December 1482."

Marginalia in a copy of Livy’s Historiae Romanae (Venice, 1470), one of the illustrations in a long New York Review of Books piece about marginalia, a topic dear to my heart as the first thing I ever blogged about, the original title of this blog, and the name of the Madison-like city in a book I never wrote.

ADDED: One of my favorite old post titles is "Genitalia marginalia," which has this memorable photograph:

Progress on the path of passivity.

"The iPad And Other Tablets Are Turning Out To Be Far More Important Than PCs Ever Were."

[T]ablets have already, by one measure, surpassed the sales numbers of both PCs and laptop-style notebook computers....

And so we see ourselves sliding into passivity. I love my iPad for reading, but it's almost useless for writing. When I'm lounging about with my iPad, I'm a reader. I can write, but it's completely awkward to do so and I rarely do. In the old days, before desktops and laptops, I read paper books, probably with a pen in hand to write notes in the margin. With my desktop and laptop — connected to the internet and loaded with texts — the process understanding through reading merged fluidly with the process of writing. I read to write, and write for readers who write back to me, and I write again, endlessly. At some point in the evening, I settle down with my iPad, and I am deactivated. I'm choosing this deactivation, on a daily basis. One must wind down and go to sleep. But I worry about people shifting to iPads and other tablets and away from the keyboard. I know reading, just reading, can be active, and I know there's the modest activity of "sharing" what is read on Facebook and Twitter, and maybe the young folks can do some serious typing on the virtual keyboard, but I fear we are sinking into passivity, that we're taking sleeping tablets.

"If I live to be 100, I’m never going to be a fan of the flowers-in-the-pubic-hair episode."

"But Lawrence’s attempts at describing the transcendent possibilities of 'warmhearted' sex no longer seemed quite so ludicrous. Next to the 'yuk' I had scribbled as a 20-year-old, there now stands a new note: 'Not so bad after all.'"

Should students switch from laptops to handwritten notes to enhance their understanding and memory?

A study suggests that the answer is yes.

The problem with laptops seems to be they facilitated verbatim note-taking, so the mind is less engaged in processing what is heard and extracting material, which is what you have to do in handwriting.

In real life, as opposed to in studies, a student — at least a law student — would need to edit these typed notes down into an outline that can be studied. Even handwritten notes — which is what I had when I went to law school — must be rewritten into something much more compressed. In the study, the subjects were tested on their understanding right after they took notes. They didn't have an outlining and study period. Another difference from real life is that the subjects don't seem to have done readings before the lecture. A real student — again, I'm assuming a law student — should have carefully read the material and taken notes before class. Class notes should be adding to pre-class notes.

When I was a law student, I took class notes that were basically annotating my pre-class notes, confirming understanding developed prior to class. Then after class, I would rewrite everything as clearly and concisely as I could, producing an outline that could be studied. Handwriting may have helped, because in annotating and rewriting things, your mind is strongly engaged in an effort to boil it down. We had no computers in those days, and computers make writing and rewriting much easier, but perhaps there's too much mental ease, too much open-endedness... I say as I blog... typing out the words....

Maybe I need to start a handwritten blog... or have a handwritten blog-post of the day/week on this blog. Years ago, I had a series of posts that reproduced marginal doodles from old notes, but they were more about the drawings than the text. I've put up photos of handwritten text for one reason or another now and then. But it always seems to be about some casual charm or mystery, not for special powers of thought realized through handwriting. It's more of an art project than a writing project, and that seems to be the case when it comes to other blogs that feature handwriting.

Obviously, on the web, if you really care about the words that are written, you want the words to be searchable text, so to write a handwritten blog — unless you rewrite everything in digital text — is to choose obscurity. It's twee and introverted. Marginalia.

"'What happened today was not credible,' were the stunned and wooden words of Tom Clancy..."

A line on page 4 of the Martin Amis book "The Second Plane/September 11: Terror and Boredom," which I began rereading last night.

Tom Clancy died last Tuesday, and I did not blog about it, because I don't blog every obituary and because I've never read (or felt motivated to read) a Tom Clancy book. It doesn't mean anything — of course, I'm not superstitious — that I'd never taken an interest in Clancy and then I run into his name on the second page of the first essay in a book I happened to take down from the shelf for no apparent reason — was it on Tuesday?

I took the book off the shelf and immediately saw something I'd written inside the back cover. I didn't remember getting this idea, but I could recognize it as my own thinking and knew that something in the book had inspired me to think that. Because my graphomania extends to marginalia — as the first post on this blog attests — I'm able to find the place in the text that inspired the back-of-the-book notes.

Looking back at my old Wisconsin protest posts from a year ago, I'm struck by...

... the bemused, distanced attitude I have and how coolly neutral I was presenting material that I could have been really sensationalistic about. It was just another day in Madison, Wisconsin, and I was looking for things to photograph. It confirms for me what I've known about myself for a long time: I'm not into politics the way other people are.

The original name of this blog was Marginalia, and — as I explain in the very first post — Marginalia was a name I made up for Madison, when I was, long ago, writing a fictionalized account of my life here in this remote outpost in the Midwest. I was writing about art and life and a little law. My only early political posts were about Wesley Clark's body fat and a mixed metaphor in the NYT.

I really do feel marginal, but as I said back when I named the blog Marginalia, I love writing marginalia.

David Foster Wallace's marginalia-filled self-help books.

Maria Bustillos got access and reports in great detail.

That Wallace even had a copy of Bradshaw On: The Family came as a great surprise to me, as I mentioned earlier. But later I talked with my very old friend, S., who went into recovery almost exactly when Wallace did. S. explained that John Bradshaw was all the rage in AA circles at that time. (Bradshaw is the guy who popularized the idea of the "inner child" in the '90s, and he had a TV show on PBS that was hugely popular.)...

A highlighted passage in Bradshaw On: The Family:

Thought Disorders:
You are always reading about your problems, learning why you are the way you are.
You are numb
You control your emotions and feel shame when you can't
You gauge your behavior by how it looks–by the image you believe you're making.

Lots more at the linked piece, which reads a bit too much like the author's raw notes. The extensive thing ends with this, a quiz Wallace gave to students:

WIN A LUNCH WITH DAVE, SPARKLING CONVERSATIONALIST, WELL-MANNERED EATER, BY SIMPLY IDENTIFYING WHAT ALL THE FOLLOWING WORDS HAVE IN COMMON:

Foreign
Big
Diminutive
Incomprehensible
Untyped
Pulchritude
S-less
Unwritten
Indefinable
Misspelled
Vulgar
High-class
Invisible
Unvowelled
Obscene

Bustillos offers her answer: "My only stab at a guess is that these are words that can be used to describe writing itself, though I feel like 'pulchritude' is kind of wrong, that way. I would love to hear other ideas." No way she'd win the lunch! Isn't it obvious that Wallace was offering up an inkblot to open up the writer's minds? He could then pick the person who'd be most amusing to talk to for an hour. If you just want a correct answer, it's: They're all adjectives. But who wants to eat lunch with someone who'd say that?

ADDED: As several commenters point out, "pulchritude" is a noun. I need to be more careful. At lunch, I would spill the iced tea.

"He stands swaying, his actions only slightly interrupted by the amputation of half his head."

Writes Gordon Grice in "The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators."

Then, while she is still eating, he crawls onto her back. He seems in this semiheadless state to have found a renewed vigor and sense of purpose. There will be no more showy stunts. His pale penis emerges from the rear of his body, extruded between the plates of his exoskeleton. His abdomen snakes around beside hers and forms a painful-looking curve. They begin to copulate.

Mantis sex. That description! Whew! It goes on...

Turning her face almost 180 degrees, she regards him for a moment, as if his attentions were a distasteful surprise. Then, twisting with some difficulty, she brings her raptorial forelimbs into position and strikes again. This time she retrieves the remainder of his head and a scrap of his thorax, from which one foreleg dangles.

He doesn't seem to mind.

He doesn't seem to mind! Ha. Well, try minding something when you have no mind. Anyway, there's quite a bit more, and the main idea is that the male insect's sexual performance is improved by the absence of a head: "He performs with more gusto once he's decapitated." Apparently, the brain is a source of inhibition.

I have exclamation points in the margin in this passage of the book, which I read a dozen years ago (when I went through a period of intense fascination with the essay form). I just got the book down from the shelf to answer a question over on Ask MetaFilter: "Can you please recommend good books (fiction or nonfiction) or websites about insects and/or spiders..? Not so much identification books, but ones about how they live, interact, etc." It was fun reading that again. I should leaf through other old books of mine and pluck out passages with exclamatory marginalia.

"This blog is called Marginalia, because I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin..."

"... and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book."

Written January 14, 2004, at 10:36 AM. The first post on this now 6-year-old blog. There have been 18,319 posts since then, including this one. I've posted at least once, each day in these 6 years, an average of 8+ posts a day. I've never had a guest blogger (or a ghost blogger), and I've written — with real enthusiasm — on the hardest work days, on the day I wrecked my car, the day I had surgery, the day I drove 1235 miles in one day, and the day I got married. And over 2,000 other days.

"Take a moment... take an hour... to try to revive and savor the antiquated pleasure of writing someone a letter."

"And then come back and say what it was like. Did you feel fidgety and impatient? Did writing feel too slow for your thoughts, or did it slow them down in a pleasurable and even fruitful way? Holding a pen to me is like holding an eager dog on a leash. Has your handwriting deteriorated from disuse, too?"

Well, I'm not going to do this, because everyone I know would either think it was crazy to write and mail a paper letter or feel oppressed by the implication that now they need to handwrite a letter.

But I do still use handwriting, and I often prefer it when I'm writing notes for my own private use — that is, not composing something for readers. I prepare for class by writing notes in the margin, and I teach the class using those notes along with the assigned text. I feel that the handwriting has a spirit to it that helps me a lot. It's not something I use to show my personality and feeling to another person, though I understand why handwriting conveys that. It's something that, for me, remains more closely interwoven with my continuing thinking about a subject. It's less final and it works better to keep me connected with the original text. Marginalia — it means a lot to me.

This blog is 4 years old today.

And this is the 10,792nd post. I have posted every single day these past 4 years, averaging over 7 posts a day. It started like this, on January 14, 2004:

This blog is called Marginalia, because I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin, and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book.

But the blog didn't stay named Marginalia. I changed the name to Althouse on day 2. Despite the name change, I really did see myself as writing marginalia that maybe somebody would run across one day on some dusty back page of the internet.

I remember when I started blogging, my across the hall colleague Gordon Smith told me his blog had about 60 readers a day, and I wondered how one could accumulate 60 readers. How I would love to have 60 readers! He told me of another law blogger who had 400 readers, and that seemed amazing. How do you get even 1 person to show up in the first place and read, and then how would you get them to come back and read every day?

I didn't know, but I loved the writing and found it truly intrinsically rewarding from that first post. Just the idea that people — anywhere — could read it was thrilling. To be here, now, 4 years later, still writing — with readers — is an immense joy.

Thanks to everyone for stopping by.

"Teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed."

It's nice to see that UW-Madison history professor William Reese is so prominently cited in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case.

From the Thomas opinion:

By the time the States ratified the Fourteenth Amendment , public schools had become relatively common. W. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” 11–12 (2005) (hereinafter Reese)....

Because public schools were initially created as substitutes for private schools, when States developed public education systems in the early 1800’s, no one doubted the government’s ability to educate and discipline children as private schools did. Like their private counterparts, early public schools were not places for freewheeling debates or exploration of competing ideas. Rather, teachers instilled “a core of common values” in students and taught them self-control. Reese 23; A. Potter & G. Emerson, The School and the Schoolmaster: A Manual 125 (1843) (“By its discipline it contributes, insensibly, to generate a spirit of subordination to lawful authority, a power of self-control, and a habit of postponing present indulgence to a greater future good …”); D. Parkerson & J. Parkerson, The Emergence of the Common School in the U. S. Countryside 6 (1998) (hereinafter Parkerson) (noting that early education activists, such as Benjamin Rush, believed public schools “help[ed] control the innate selfishness of the individual”).

Teachers instilled these values not only by presenting ideas but also through strict discipline. Butts 274–275. Schools punished students for behavior the school considered disrespectful or wrong. Parkerson 65 (noting that children were punished for idleness, talking, profanity, and slovenliness). Rules of etiquette were enforced, and courteous behavior was demanded. Reese 40. To meet their educational objectives, schools required absolute obedience. C. Northend, The Teacher’s Assistant or Hints and Methods in School Discipline and Instruction 44, 52 (1865) (“I consider a school judiciously governed, where order prevails; where the strictest sense of propriety is manifested by the pupils towards the teacher, and towards each other . . .” (internal quotation marks omitted)).2

In short, in the earliest public schools, teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed. Teachers did not rely solely on the power of ideas to persuade; they relied on discipline to maintain order.

Any comments on that idea for public schools? Note the distinction between: 1. preferring that model for the schools, and 2. accepting it as something that is constitutionally permissible. You can believe #2, without going for #1. You can also reject both #1 & #2, or accept both. You could also believe #1, but not #2, but I will have to disapprove of you if you don't concede that you must forgo your preference.

ADDED: Thanks to my colleague, Karl Shoemaker, who pointed out the references to Reese. Regular readers remember Shoemaker as the historian who sent me this photo of ancient marginalia (and gave me the chance to write my favorite rhyming blog post title:

Genitalia marginalia.

We were just talking about how people in 1824 saw the double entendre in that line -- "it is intercourse" -- in Gibbons v. Ogden. I ended that post saying, "We forget that people in the past were always talking about sex," and linking to an article about all the sexual double entendre in Shakespeare:

'The plays are absolutely packed with filth,' said academic Héloïse Sénéchal. 'I've found more than a hundred terms for vagina alone.'...

She claims that previous editions of Shakespeare have been too prudish, and that by using computer techniques she has uncovered unrecognised double entendres. These were aimed at the working classes who crowded into the Globe in London for their fill of bawdy entertainment. Sénéchal has identified seemingly innocuous words such as carrot, pencil and horn as terms for penis, while she pinpoints pie, fruit dish and 'buggle boe' as references to the vagina.

My colleague Karl Shoemaker, upon reading my post -- no pun intended! -- wanted me to see something that he found while reading 13th century plea rolls in London. So it's much older than Shakespeare and in the law context. Here's a photograph -- Karl had his student assistant take it -- of a corner of a document:



The words -- "ores itaunt le ad misyre/et itaunt le ad Gerardare" -- are law French. Karl's translation: "And thus Gerard to my Messire/And thus my Lord to Gerard." You can see the drawings at the end of each line, completing the thoughts -- rebus style.

The genitalia marginalia is a penis rebus.

This blog is 3 years old today.

Here's what I said 2 years ago:

One year old!

The day has finally come. This blog is one year old today. It's been pretty cool. I remember starting off in utter obscurity, thinking I'd better take care what I write, because I've got to assume that, eventually, some people who know me are going to find this. And now the Sitemeter is up over 900,000. Thanks to all the readers for coming by!

One year ago... minimalism was in:

Two years old today...

This blog is.

Going all the way back to the beginning, January 14, 2004, to the first post, at 10:36 a.m.:

This blog is called Marginalia, because I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin, and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book.

But I'm still here somehow, still checking in daily from my remote outpost in Marginalia.